Kerry Film Festival presented the Maureen O’Hara award to 2017 recipient Director and Editor Emer Reynolds at a ceremony in Dublin October 4. Local Kerry ceramic artist Amy Smith was proud to create the award which recipient Director Emer Reynolds holds here.

THE Kerry Film Festival presented the 2017 Maureen O’Hara Award to director Emer Reynolds (The Farthest), in celebration of her enormous contribution to the film industry.

The Maureen O’Hara Award for this year — presented to Emer Reynolds by Maeve McGrath, Artistic Director of Kerry Film Festival — was created by Amy Smith, a ceramicist and pottery teacher living and working in Tralee.

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Hew newest feature documentary, ‘The Farthest’ is a visually stunning and heartfelt portrait of the Voyager Space Probe and the people who dedicated their lives to reaching out to the cosmos and looking outside of ourselves.

One of the year’s best films, it continues to captivate audiences worldwide and will screen at the Kerry Film festival this October.

The Kerry Film Festival inaugurated the Maureen O’Hara Award in 2008 to celebrate outstanding women in cinema. The award was named in honour of O’Hara, one of Hollywood’s best loved and most inspiring actresses.

Most recently, the award was presented posthumously to Sarah Elizabeth Jones, a talented, committed camera operator who tragically lost her life on set.

In presenting the award, the festival acknowledges the wealth of female talent in all sectors of the film industry, women in front of and behind the camera, who shine through for their exceptional talent and commitment to their craft.

Reynolds is an Emmy nominated multi-award-winning documentary director and feature film editor, based in Dublin, Ireland.

Over the last two decades, her work has spanned feature films, TV Drama and documentary, including editing one of the most critically-acclaimed Irish feature films, ‘I Went down’.

Documentaries Emer has worked on include the multi-award winning, twice Emmy nominated wildlife feature ‘Broken Tail’ and the three times Emmy nominated ‘On a River in Ireland’ made for the BBC & PBS.

Emer directed ‘Here Was Cuba’, a stunning feature documentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis, described by the Hollywood Reporter as “a real-life end-of-the-world-thriller”.

The Kerry Film Festival takes place in the picturesque town of Killarney from October 19-22. Showcasing the best in Feature, Short and Documentary Cinema from at home and abroad, and introducing Discovery Features, a platform for first time feature film makers, the 18th Kerry Film Festival is shaping up to be one of the must-attend events on the Irish film calendar.

For tickets and more information see http://www.kerryfilmfestival.com/